Connecting the people, ideas and energy of the menswear business
MR Magazine hosted the sixth annual Uptown/Downtown Awards dinner at the Four Seasons restaurant in Midtown Manhattan on Monday to honor two Menswear Hall of Fame inductees, Russ Patrick of Neiman Marcus and David Witman of Nordstrom, along with 12 retailers: Blackbird, The Claymore Shop, David Wood, Fred Segal Man, Godfry’s, Haberdash, Harley’s, Kositchek’s, Norton [...]
Sid Mashburn brings Southern hospitality to menswear. Sid Mashburn waxes nostalgic for men’s stores of the past when asked about his approach to retailing. “You were taught how to feel comfortable in your own skin and introduced to skills that would serve you well for your entire life. This wasn’t just a shopping trip. These [...]
Pitkin County Dry Goods brings high fashion to Aspen. Entrepreneur Don Fleisher moved to Aspen in 1968 and quickly noticed that it lacked a suitable clothing store. It seems he was unimpressed with the town’s actual dry goods outpost, where you could buy rope and bed pillows as well as your Levi’s. On July 4th, [...]
Perlis is selling menswear with a side of crawfish. Imagine this scenario: you’re a menswear retailer in the South. You sell close to 5,000 Lacoste polo shirts a year, and then all of a sudden Lacoste drops your account, and Polo Ralph Lauren won’t sell you either. What is a merchant to do? That’s exactly [...]
Norton Ditto finds more success just outside of Houston Before I can ask Dick Hite my first question, the proud owner of Norton Ditto exclaims, “The Woodlands store is on fire! We’ve seen 20 percent increases each month since it opened two years ago.” Hite attributes much of that growth to the location, a young, [...]
David Kositchek’s humility and hospitality have kept his fourth-generation business going strong. “I grew up here—I started working at the store as a child,” remembers David Kositchek, fourth-generation owner of Lansing, Michigan’s Kositchek’s. “I was so proud to work with my father and my grandfather.” While Kositchek can’t imagine doing anything else, he recognizes that [...]
Harley’s Tim Ryan went from the stockroom to the boardroom. Tim Ryan has, quite literally, risen through the ranks at Harleys, an upscale men’s store in Shorewood, Wisc. He started as a stockboy when he was an undergrad law student. “I was put on the wait list for three different law schools, became a full-time [...]
Just six years old, Chicago-based Haberdash is evolving at a brisk pace. In 2005, Chicago attorney Adam Beltzman reinvented himself and got into the menswear retail business with Haberdash, a denim-driven specialty store. “I really disliked what I was doing,” he says of his first career. “I hated getting up in the morning for work. [...]
Godfry’s Heinz Ellrod knows first hand. “It was like throwing a party and no one shows up,” says Heinz Ellrod, founder and owner of Godfry’s, about opening a store during a recession. “We moved locations in October 2008—the exact worst time to ever open a store.” Luckily he and his wife Martha acted quickly and [...]
The Menswear Hall of Fame Texas talent: Russ Patrick Neiman Marcus’s Russ Patrick is described by vendor colleagues as “highly principled,” “pragmatic,” “a merchant’s merchant.” “He’s very tuned into the selling floor,” says Mike Cohen of Hickey Freeman. “He digs deep to figure out why things are selling or not. He’s incredibly connected to [...]
Copyright © 2013 · Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in
